Virginia Nine - Text
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Age: 61
Date of Birth: 7.12.48
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Waterman
Educational Level: College
INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: He grew up on Tangier but went to “mainland” Virginia for college. He lives and works on Tangier Island, Virginia.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I think the politicians have got into it and we just think they’re takin the facts and twistin’ them all around and it’s not true; our water is cleaner now than it’s been for years. What we go by is we just put our [crab] pots in the water in April and we could take ‘em up in November and they were just as clean as the day we put ‘em in the water. Now there’s….sometimes you gotta take ‘em out let ‘em dry off or you spray ‘em with a pressure washer to clean ‘em off. And the farther up the Bay you go the worse this is. They even use [?] paint to try to protect ‘em to get 5 or 6 weeks and then they gotta…. But see we don’t have that problem down here—our water’s cleaner. It’s overfished, but we have probably half the fishermen we had ten years ago. They’re on tugboats, or they’re…all got old and…or died, and there’s nobody takin’ their place. ‘Cause what it costs to get into the business anymore, it’s not….they’re just not worth doin’. I mean … it’s hard to get a license, the young kids, they graduate from school, they can’t get a license…cause there are restrictions on how many licenses there can be on all this. Our job that we do in the winter—there’s only …there’s only 11 of us on the Island—they took the job away from us. They gave us another job of goin’ out and collectin’ old abandoned pots that are on the bottom—for three years! But I rather be out doin’ the job I do in the winter. See we dredge for crabs like you would scallops in the wintertime. And you could make a living doing that but they took it away. Now supposedly you can go back after next year and do it, but they even tried to take the law off the books which meant that we would never go back and do it again. So that woulda left us with no job. Cause it’s been goin’ on for a hundred years and it …. There’s only like 25 of us doin’ the job from January through March, and I don’t know—how’s 25 people gonna do any damage to the whole bay? But these politicians made it out into a big issue. Twenty-five in the whole bay! [Well have they backed off a little?] Well…They make…you know, we’re gonna ghost pot this year and next year, then we can go back dredgin’. But they tried to—like I said—they tried to take the law off the books, which meant that there would be no more dredgin’. So we’re hopin’ to get a new governor in that would…—he’s promised us things are gonna change if he can get elected. ‘Cause this is a Democrat that’s in, and a Republican that’s running, and we’re gonna vote for the Republican.
RECORDED, TRANSCRIBED BY TANERA MARSHALL, SEPTEMBER 20, 2009.
RUNNING TIME: 3:20